Ackerman's Centers extend the reach of the Institute by focusing on specific topic areas and by developing both clinical and preventive models for dissemination into the community:

• Children and Relational Trauma: assists children affected by life altering trauma including family violence, the death of a parent or sibling, and sexual abuse through a therapeutic model that recognizes family relationships as the nexus of trauma and as points of access for care.
  
  
• Developing Child and Family: supports the ongoing social, emotional, cognitive and physical development of children and parents in the context of family and school.
  
  
• Families and Health: helps families address the impact of chronic and/or life-shortening illness on marital, parent/child, and intergenerational relationships; the effects of these relationships on an illness; and on interaction with healthcare professionals involved in their lives.
  
  
• Substance Abuse and the Family: works with families where substance abuse is a complicating factor compromising the family's ability to address crises and manage on going issues in family life.
  
  
• Work and Family: assists families on all socio-economic levels, including homeless families, to balance the multiple demands of home and work as well as to prevent the negative effects of work at home and the spillover of family conflict into the workplace.
  
  

Each Center focuses on an individual specialty, and this structure has proven to be an exceptional means of:

• responding to the changing needs of families
  
  
• facilitating the flow of information among faculty and students
  
  
• creating opportunities for faculty to collaborate on special programs and projects
  
  
• extending outreach and training to community based organizations and individual practitioners
  
  
• From its belief that families matter, the Ackerman Institute for the Family empowers families in those settings that are most important to them at home, school, work, and community. For forty five years, the Institute has pioneered the development, delivery, and dissemination of treatment strategies that have built stronger families